January 2023 in Music
Way back at the end of last year, I had planned to blog regularly about the music I listened to each month. To that end, I dutifully made one playlist at the end of each month, starting with January. However, I was immediately halted by two lions at the gate: first, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t actually know how to write about music. Anything I say on the subject tends to either become a stilted aping how more sophisticated aficionados write, or a repetitive yet genuine expression of the theme “hey, I like this, I like this a lot, you should too,” and so on.
The second lion was even worse: it’s easier and more fun to make a playlist than it is to write about it. Consequently, it is now September 23, and I am posting my playlist of music I enjoyed in January. In the past I would have just packed up and deferred the project to another year, but I’ve come to realize that if I don’t do something late, I probably won’t do it at all. So here we are.
Caveat – as I mentioned, I’m out of my depth. I’m not a music writer; I just gesticulate and riff.
Clarification – this is just some music I happened to listen to a lot in January 2023; it’s not actually music from January 2023, just to be clear.
All right, here goes:
Goodbye Stranger, Supertramp, 1979 – I had never listened to Supertramp before, but I ended up playing this constantly after it showed up in the Beau is Afraid trailer. Now, there’s a little bit of a spoiler here, but the trailer, while obviously indicating that the film will be dark and even upsetting (I mean it is Ari Aster), seemed to me to suggest some sort of catharsis on the other side of that, and the song’s optimism became entangled with my own fascination with any gesture toward transcendent catharsis – toward a revelation which makes emotional sense of a bad situation. It turns out that’s not really what the film is about, which is why I didn’t like it that much, though I respect how well-made it is and how well it does what it was trying to do, even if it wasn’t what I expected. But this song retains its earworm quality, probably because of the rising falsetto – there’s just not a lot of that out there, and it’s incredibly sunny.
Pandora, James Horner, 2009 – I went back and revisited the late great James Horner’s score for the first Avatar film on the occasion of watching its sequel. I’ve come to appreciate the franchise more over time, and I don’t think I had really paid that much attention to the music when it first came out – but I should have. Horner creates a vast space within the score, and uses it almost as an additional form of sound design, to place the listener in a world that feels vivid and exotic and, above all, fresh with promise. This feels like someone crossed Adiemus with a jungle version of Horner’s forest-sound score work on The New World.
Ocean Lights & Peace of Mind, Takagi Masakatsu, 2021 – I have said before, and here reaffirm, that Takagi Masakatsu is Our Greatest Living Composer, and I will be here for anything he does. I’ve listened to so many hours of his music over the years, it’s hard to even estimate how many. But Takagi tends to post proper albums sporadically – about half, or actually probably a bit more than half of what he posts are albums of marginalia, collages of musical notes – though those are also quite good. Recently, however, he put out a series of scores for a Japanese TV show I’ve never heard of and know nothing about. To be honest, it looks incredibly low budget, but if Takagi is writing music, I’m going to listen to it, and he does not disappoint here. Ocean Lights feels like the swelling march of the waves, proud and happy, carrying me along with no resistance. Peace of Mind is another collaboration with the singer Ann Sally, who featured on his greatest work, the score for Wolf Children. Sally has an incredibly delicate approach to each line, and it really does live up to its title.
Tank!, Rain, & Space Lion, SEATBELTS & Steve Conte, 1998 – I finally sat down and watched Cowboy Bebop, the ultimate classic space noir from the 90s, a show that I think sits at the center of a straight line from Star Wars to Firefly and then every single other down and out ragtag band of space misfits in contemporary fiction. Bebop has an incredibly soundtrack; it’s jazzy and big and totally unembarrassed by pretentions to restraint, and the first two tracks are great examples of that. But Space Lion is more than that – I kept coming back to it, because it really captured one of the emotional high points of the series, and held it, like starlight in a glass. There are a lot of big, emotional scores out there, but very few of their highlight tracks start with a hazy saxophone solo. But the moment the drums come in, and then the choir, the temperature shifts; it’s like the sun going down, and the aurora slowly unfurling itself, revealing that it was always there – you just weren’t looking.
Welcome Home, We Know What You Whisper, & Wakanda Forever, Ludwig Göransson, 2022 – Ok, so this score did come out right before January. I don’t want to go into a huge tangent about the Black Panther sequel, because I have so many thoughts about it (I think it’s flawed but still the most interesting Marvel project in a long time, and I generally liked it, certainly more than a lot of the recent output). So, without getting bogged down in all that interesting rabbit trail, let me just say that Göransson is having a fantastic year (I expect his Oscar will be arriving in a few months for Oppenheimer). I feel that in all the discussion of this movie, the score almost got neglected. People were really impressed and excited about the original Black Panther score, and rightfully so, but this is actually more interesting to me, because of how well the score shifts to not simply repeat the themes of the original in a kind of nostalgia (which I’m sure audiences were ready for). Instead, it swerves, not only into a darker vein, but one which reflects the environmental shift in the film; Wakanda Forever is colder, bluer, and there’s a marked shift toward the science-fiction aspects of the world. Just like the attempts to revive the herb by a synthetic process, the score takes the earthier beats of the original, and grafts them into a substrate dominated by cold electronic noise. These tracks are standouts, and my favorite is the one that shares the name of its film – it sets up a new theme that is synthetic and electric blue, and I remember when it played in the theater it felt like being in a vibrating prism.
Free Bird, Lynyrd Skynyrd – All right, ok, this one got in here because it’s a meme. But you know what? It’s a good meme. Zoomers rediscovering the power of classic rock through silly tiktoks is what intergenerational perpetuation of American culture looks like in the twenty-first century. But actually if I’m being honest, I had never listened to Skynyrd before either, so I’m in the same boat with the youths on this one.
The whole point of this one is the transition point where it switches from a lazy, mellow riff to a propulsive guitar solo, a bifurcation that reminds me of Layla (one of the best rock songs of all time). The thing that finally got me nodding along with this meme like a grinning Jack Nicholson was a video where someone posted nine minutes of a rocket sitting on the launchpad and then finally launching, with ignition timed to the song’s transition. To me, that is cinema.
I already talked about Friday I’m In Love (The Cure), and the main title from Andor (Nicholas Britell), and the music from The Rings of Power (Bear McCreary) in my post about music I listened to in 2022. That they still are on this playlist is endorsement enough. But I really want to emphasize the particular nostalgic sonic space created by The Cure in this song. There’s something about that moment at the end of the previous century that tinged music with an upbeat melancholy that’s hard to explain and impossible to fake.
Once in a Lifetime & Take Me to the River, Talking Heads – I finally watched Jonathan Demme’s legendary concert film Stop Making Sense, and I am very late to the party but I am happy to be here all the same. The sense of disorientation at the passage of time, the moment vanishing rapidly downstream even in the midst of endless repetition through time is only going to get more resonant as I get older, isn’t it? Oh dear.
Storm Is Coming, Junkie XL – The most iconic track from the mechanical tornado that is the Fury Road score needs no introduction to anyone familiar with the movie. It’s so easy for this sort of choppy, dramatic, overcranked score to slip into generic noise, but this transcends its genre to loom like the threatening sandstorm of the film, monolithic yet dynamic. Midway through the track, the wind’s dark melody overpowers the throbbing engines, and reminds humanity of our place.
The Visitors/Bye/End Titles from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, John Williams – I think this monster of a track can hold its own with any other example of Williams’ work. It mirrors the film in movement from darkened confusion, rising into clarity of vision, the apotheosis (which is exactly what the UFOs function as). This is as good an example as any of the classic Hollywood string sounds of outer space – climbing and spiraling ever higher. Finally it breaks into a majestic euphony of bells and horns and strings, rising upward through the clouds to touch the stars above, where it resolves into a tremulous choir. In the end, it feels more open than closed, not definitive, but posing a final, unanswered question: are we alone, or, not?
Balcony Scene from Romeo + Juliet, Craig Armstrong – This manages to mirror the tentative, questing, fearful-yet-hopeful feeling of the young lovers undone by a heaven glimpsed through the silly honesty of a teenage crush. I latched onto this song specifically because there’s a line that repeats over the end of the track, glancing up and down, which breaks like lightning over the melody, and smells like wet grass in spring.
In The Meantime, Spacehog – Like the first song on this playlist, I discovered this through its use in a movie trailer, in this case for the third Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s just a rollicking great rock song, impossible not to be carried along with, up through the atmosphere into the far out wilds above.
This Is to Mother You, Sinead O’Connor – When I made this list, the great Irish artist was still with us; I didn’t yet know that this was her last year, and in fact, I had just recently starting listening to her music. There are so many fantastic songs she left us with; this one has a certain redemptive, healing sense about it. It’s a gentle work of comforting grace – and don’t we all need just that?
Wild Horses, The Sundays – The Sundays, who only put out three albums over the first seven years of my life, have in retrospect become one of my most beloved bands. All their work has an echoing wistfulness, and this is a great example of that. It’s about the strength of affective attachment, paradoxically expressed through the unconstrainable nomadic strength of the horses.
Aettartre/End Credits from The Northman, Robin Carolan, Sebatian Gainsborough – This entire score is excellent, but the final track captures the wild breaking in of what is now an ancient, alien vision of the world and what lies beyond it, plucked strings drawing together, towards some fated collision with eternity.
Breakfast in America, Supertramp – We end with the same album with which we began. To be honest, this is an enormously goofy song, and it gets sillier the more I listen to it; but I enjoy that. A stereotyped, foreign caricature of America as a land of wealth, expressed with silly tubas yet in a minor march – there’s a lot here to enjoy, and who said music has to be serious to be good?
